Hope this helps answer some of the question you may have had. As can often happen after reading an interview, you may have more questions. Feel free to post additional questions right here in the forum posting for this article.

The latest version of the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Courseware is due to be released and presented for the first time at Hacker Halted USA 2008 in June. Many small details of CEH Version 6 have been peppered on the Internet, as well as snippets of teaser copy on EC-Council’s own web site.

“With a total of 28 new and never seen before modules, covering the latest concepts, featuring more real life cases, and showcasing the latest hacking and security tools, the Certified Ethical Hacker (Version 6) will be the most advanced course ever.”

So I requested an interview with EC-Council to see if we could get confirmation as well as clarification. The questions are compiled from my own list as well as some others that were suggested by readers of The Ethical Hacker Network (EH-Net). EC-Council replied in a very timely manner with answers from both Haja Mohideen, co-founder of EC-Council, and Chuck Swanson, the instructor scheduled to teach the very first v6 offering of the course.

thanks for providing the interview. As I'm currently undecided which cert to aim for it's nice to be able to get a feel for where one of the potential certs are heading.

I was glad that the stance of the C|EH was questioned, particularly the focus on specific tools and the certification path between EC-Council's various certs. From this I am starting to feel that the C|EH possibly isn't the cert for me; from my experience the the policy issues and methodologies form are an important aspect of allowing a security professional to add value to a business rather than just exploit vulnerable systems.

In other words, they threw in 30+ modules of "extra reading" that will not be on the exam.

I've read his analogy of comparing the certification track to preparing for war before too, can't remember where though. I still disagree a little with the EC-Council train of thought on this. I lean more towards agreeing with the GPEN and Ed's way of thinking, where "let's learn the tools we're going to use" rather than "lets play around with 100+ tools so that we forget which ones do what until we narrow it down to the ones we'll use". Just my thoughts...